Home | Why The Big SEO Company Is Killing The True SEO by Benjamin Pfeiffer

Why The Big SEO Company Is Killing The True SEO

by Benjamin Pfeiffer

Earlier today, Barry wrote on Search Engine Roundable
about a thread over at Cre8asite that details the balance
between good user centered design and the ability to
maintain rankings. When it came down to it you will
ultimately have to sacrifice somewhere and often its
hard to reach the right balance of both. Ideally we
would all like balance for our sites, we want both the
usability of a well planned site to assist in high conversions
and we also want high rankings. Not just any rankings,
we want a #1 ranking in Google. The most coveted position,
and even without any pre-conceived knowledge about SEO
you may know that that is the spot to be. Like the undeniable
truth of viewing a fine diamond, you don't need to be
a gemologist in order to understand its rarity and value.
Likewise, you don't need to be an SEO these days to
know the value of effective targeted natural search
marketing campaign. These campaigns are as valuable
as a fine diamond sometimes, and there are a lot of
those that know this. This brief article on the industry
will talk about those that are capitalizing on it.

I have a problem with the SEO industry today, and it's
something that I don't see getting any better. It's
got me so worked up today, that I feel it's important
to tell all from the way I see it. I actually see the
problem compounding over time, until the lines are so
blurred in terms of what a real SEO is supposed to do
that it will drown those people that actually do the
work of a true SEO. The ones that know how to make the
whole puzzle of SEO work, and do it for real. SEO may
one day be wrapped up with traditional forms of marketing
like media and print. One of the reasons for this will
be the reduction in effectiveness that SEO services
return. Some of this will be a loss of consumer confidence.
The cost of SEO will outweigh the return more or less.
While SEO was once being trumpeted as more effective
than print, TV, banner ads, and so on, it may eventually
concede to levels of regulated mediocrity. These services
will be inaccessible to smaller to moderate companies
who can't afford mediocre forms of marketing, much like
they do today. This will partly be fueled by the growing
enterprises of big time SEO operations who leave an
aftermath of dissatisfied clients.

The Problem

The problem I have with the industry has to
relate to large SEO companies and the supposed quote
on quote "SEO" work they do for clients. Often
the only real "work" they do is paying someone
to issue an invoice and collect a check each month.
I am particularly concerned with the lack of work SEO
companies do, and then charge as if they had done it.
Clients are not seeing results they had been promised.
Many clients are helpless to obtain a refund even for
the work. If you have been around the search marketing
industry for a good while you might be familiar with
issues for the opposite problem happening early on in
its history. The smaller SEO or consultant charging
for services but never delivering. This was growing
pains. Now obviously some people got ripped off, and
for the most part this is still happening today, except
for the fact that there are "bigger" personalities
that people can instantly recognize doing it. It's now
become a business to rip people off. These personalities
are not people per se, but more or less the large scale
SEO operations that have arisen to capitalize on all
the money flowing into our small little industry. There
is so much money flowing in recently that it's a no
brainier to be involved. Two years ago I would have
said the same thing, and so could many others. It is
why there are the first indications of problems arising
now. For many companies it's like getting into
a bank vault without needing the combination. It can
be too easy to make a buck these days in the SEO industry.
I am not joking either, people are getting rich and
your probably not one of them. For those that are, the
problem with company brands or images is that you have
to maintain them, and doing so requires keeping a front,
this front is then backed up credibility wise with the
acquisition of premium large cap corporate companies
as clients. Think of any major corporate company at
your local shopping center, and any one of those would
work as a good "front" client to impress future
clients. For the most part the work promised to these
large corporate companies is done with timeliness, excellence,
and dedication. They get the top experts and the best
service possible. I have worked with such clients, its
enjoyable work as it's more challenging than doing
search marketing consultancy with mom and pop sites
on limited budgets and time. Time is one thing you will
learn is the rarest commodity in an SEO client. However
as I began above these big corporate clients serve as
a front for integrity to gain new clients.

The reason I go into this, is that I see so many businesses and
webmasters swayed by the “awe” of such work,
as if it's a good indicator of the work that will
be done for them. People tend to need assurance when
spending a good deal of money on something that can
not be guaranteed. Now while I don't have a problem
at all with any of the tactics to gain large scale clients,
and for the most part I applaud such acquisitions. Most
larger companies do a great job and should be recognized
for it, yet it should be noted only for that job. That
should not be transferred nor thought as an indicator
of what type of services they offer their other clients.
There is a remarkable difference between doing SEO for
Wal-Mart's network of sites and doing SEO for John's
Soy Candle Emporium. You can't compare it, as each is
so different in its needs that you can't interchangeably
offer the same service to each, or the same rate to
each either. Imagine it as trying to squeeze a square
block through a round hole. It just won't work.

The Trail of Broken Promises

This year alone, 60% of all new clients I have taken
on have been what I like to call the "recycled
SEO". A recycled SEO client is a client who has
previously worked with another SEO company, who was
either got scammed, not delivered upon, or cheated in
some way. They also might have had optimization done
that is really just SEO spam, or they never got anything
at all. They are extremely frustrated, confused, and
unsure with how to market their websites on the internet
most importantly the search engines that they don't
know what to do. It's usually not till after I
sign a client or after the first phone call that I learn
about their previous SEO experience with other companies.
To make a quote for a client you only really need to
know about the last company if they did anything to
harm the site. The saddest part about all these is that
most "legit" large SEO companies sometimes
don't do anything at all to the sites. So as you can
see I don't make an effort to find the history unless
the client voluntarily gives it too me. If they do,
I ask more questions and learn more about the situation.
Interestingly, it seems that the companies that are
known to spam the engines with hidden text, hidden links,
CSS hacks, doorway pages, and so on really do more work
than the "legit" SEO company. Is it really
easier to spam a search engine rather than do the real
work it takes to rank a website high in the engines?
Why is the work being paid for not being done? May I
introduce you to the new S.E.O.

The Rise of the Sales Efficiency Organization (S.E.O)

I had a new prospective client call me today, to follow
up on a proposal I sent them. They wanted more detailed
information about where all the money would be allocated
to. I said okay, and we started to talk more about the
site. We arrived at the subject of cost and that he
had trouble understanding why I charged more than said
"XYZ SEO company". He told me that the company
was charging about $450 a month for the SEO work. I
looked at the site, and I asked "What SEO work?".
He said, well the SEO work on the site they did. I asked
if they had ever touched the code of the website, requested
FTP access, etc.. He said no, not at all, but they promised
him that the SEO work was there, but the reality was
that there was no such search engine optimization done
to the site. No PPC marketing either, no link building.
Nothing. Bizarre I know, and you wouldn't believe me
if I told you it was a well known company. The client
continued to tell me he had been paying for 6 months.
That's about $2700 in fees for nothing... Now obviously
the client got swindled by someone that never did the
work. They did in fact convince this client that they
had actually done something. Therein lies the problem,
the sales problem.

The story above is a true story, one I witnessed today
and on many occasions and used to illustrate what I
see so commonly among new clients and interested people
this year. I usually follow up the client with a debriefing
of the incident, and explain the situation and what
he is to do next. I don't care if they become my client,
because frankly I am too busy. I want to help just as
long as they are treated fairly and honestly. If at
all I hope I can save some people some trouble.

Now, SEO companies are morphing into what I call a
"Sales Efficiency Organization". Or S.E.O
for short. They are primary sales companies that are
set up with high efficiency to pump out as much SEO
service sale churn as possible. Sell SEO to as many
customers as possible for the highest amount possible.
Instead of devoting resources to growing a link building
division, they instead grow a phone or email sales staff
capable of selling a screen door to a submarine. It's
that effective, and it's so good in fact it that
so many are getting taken in than the organization can
handle. They are getting sloppy, because it's
too easy to sell SEO and too hard to deliver SEO. Have
you have cruised an SEO company website to find pictures
of the management and staff? Have you seen those pictures
that have like a ton of people in the picture and at
the bottom of the picture is says "Sales Team".
You quickly glance to the other pictures and find the
one with the "SEO Consultants" with about
5-10 people. Or better yet you get a massive picture
of the whole team only with the label "XYZ team",
it hard to tell who is who. This ship may reach a critical
mass one day and when that does you better be half way
to Bermuda when it happens.

A Past S.E.O. Example

Some of you might remember the Traffic Power incident
recently. If you don't then I encourage you to do a
search in Google and read up on it. This company was
set up as a sales efficiency organization in order to
sell as many SEO packages as possible to clients and
charge them on a monthly recurring basis to maintain
the spammy doorway pages. They had to get extremely
crafty in order to maintain some effectiveness with
search and continue to sell their services. They at
least had to make all the clients they had feel they
got something for their money. This was great for while,
until guess what they reached a critical mass and someone
noticed and pushed the red button. Overnight, all of
the Traffic Power's clients were gone from Google. Mass
chaos erupted and people didn't know what happened.
This not only effected new clients, but it also affected
old clients who had used them quite a long time ago.
Traffic Power still keep around the old doorway pages
of its clients to redirect traffic to new clients in
the same category. Some old links were never taken off.
Luckily Google was kind enough to work with victimized
webmasters and make sure they got penalties lifted.
While that mess is behind us, it is a very good example
of a company who lost its main focus.

I had the unique oppourtunity at a past conference
to talk with the managing director of the largest SEO
company in Britian. Most would probably not agree, but
in reality their claim was probably true. By largest
I mean the number of staff they eimployed was around
60-70 at the time. Lucky for me, the fine chap was a
bit drunk off American beer and we talked for about
an hour on the details of his operation. The conversation
started out with "I can't tell you that" to
my questions and later in the evening he fussed up on
the details of the organization. He told me his company
employees the largest sales team in Europe to sell SEO.
They have about 60 people manning phones and computers
taking orders. I thought at first he meant he had 60
SEO/SEM optimizers working on websites. No he had 60
trained sales staff with no prior experience to search
engine marketing. They were just selling a product.
I then asked him how many SEO's he had as he probably
had a good deal of business. He said they had 2-3 people
actually doing anything on a regular basis. All that
they had to do was get the clients keywords insert them
into their program, and it would create hundreds of
pages of optimized garage they could feed the engines.
He said they hosted these pages most of the time. I
was blown away and shocked obviously. He then later
fussed up that they had around 200 clients, half of
which went down after Florida (which had just happened)
and he got a smile and said they had a solution to the
problem. He ended with telling me he had made a good
deal of money and if his tactics got attacked he wouldn't
really care as it would be too hard to track the source
down and they could always modify the program. I don't
know what happened to his company but from what I know
its still around cranking out clients and spam pages
for the search engines. .

Can you blame companies for selling SEO like this?
Yes and no. I think sometimes it's natural for
things like this to get used in this fashion. With anything
that becomes popular there will always be those that
want to gain from it. Often these large companies work
to raise awareness for the industry and they bring in
more clients for us all. The more people know about
it, the more interest they might show in what SEO can
do. They also have a greater chance to cause more damage.
What these larger companies need to realize is that
SEO can not be sold the way they are doing it. This
is not a product that can be boxed up and shipped like
a set of Ginsu knives. It just doesn't work that way,
and it's only getting more difficult for SEO's to do
their jobs.

A cursory look back at the dot com boom and eventual
bust has parallels to what is happening with the SEO
industry. Like the dot com boom a lot of money flowed
into the market, it was fueled by heightened esteem
and belief that such an economy would never end. The
reason there was a dot com bust was that money was being
made out of thin air. There was an abundance of millionaires
but not a lot to base that status on. While I don't
think there will be a big bust with the SEO industry,
there might be little bangs and pops here and there
that will correct it.

Conclusion

Back to the true SEO and his role today. Growing confidence
in the services offered for SEO I think will need to
improve. Reputation of the industry is also an issue
that has been addressed many times, and discussed most
notably in forums such as Search Engine Watch and other
notable forums. People are talking about it and discussing
it, and for the most part it's pretty well known
about. However it's hard to say what to do. The
true SEO who actually does the work it takes to rank
a website often times doesn't make a whole lot of money.
There are too many other costs involved and time is
one of the biggest. Its a long process to get to the
top if you have a new website and you need to realize
that. Search engines themselves are making it a lot
harder as well. They are getting more sophisticated
in order to circumvent some of the SEO work. Search
engines may prefer for websites to get created without
SEO in mind. This brief article was intended to highlight
some of the problems being faced and to serve as an
advisory notice so that webmasters and business owners
are aware of the pitfalls out there. You need to make
sure you are getting what you pay for, and don't be
afraid to ask questions. Don't buy SEO from someone
who tries to "sell" you SEO services and produces
a lot of hype. Instead buy SEO services for the real
talent behind the sale, as they will tell you the real
issues facing your website and not a pre-packages version
of what all sites face. You will be a lot happier in
the long run.